


A Rather Extreme Trick (and no treats)

by ProbablyBeatrice



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Prequel, Spookfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 15:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16478141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProbablyBeatrice/pseuds/ProbablyBeatrice
Summary: In which Bart appears on the front doorstep of the Holistic Detective Agency on Halloween night.





	A Rather Extreme Trick (and no treats)

**Author's Note:**

> RIGHT. I suppose that I should explain a bit of what's going on. Basically, I'm writing a fanfiction for DGHDA that will be published in the new year (I'm so sorry to those of you who check out my profile for Les Mis stuff, I will get around to finishing that - I promise!) and I saw the Spookfest as an amazing opportunity to write a prequel, explaining how the characters ended up where they were! Exciting, huh? Well, not really because it just gives me even MORE work to do, but that's part of the fun!  
> Sorry if you have no interest in reading my upcoming work and are completely bored by all of this, and thank you SO MUCH to @gleek-runner on Tumblr for their amazing support and fantastic encouragement throughout the Spookfest.  
> Happy Halloween, everyone! And I'm sorry for how short this is!

   Halloween had not been celebrated in Blackwing. It didn’t comply with ‘rules and regulations’, which pretty much just seemed to state ‘no one is to enjoy themselves at all, ever’ as far as Dirk knew. Of course, he had never actually read the regulations of Blackwing, but it seemed unlikely that even the directors of the facility would have paid any attention to it other than to ban it. Frankly, they didn’t seem the type to have families with children desperately waiting to go trick or treating, or perhaps apple bobbing?

   “We should go trick or treating!” he had told Todd earnestly a few weeks before – the sixth of October, to be exact. They had been sitting in the office of the agency, Dirk drinking tea and eating overpriced Halloween sweets – the chocolate skeleton ones, with caramel in the middle. He thought that they were delicious. Farah thought that he needed to stop spending agency funding on them.

   Todd had laughed, rolling his eyes slightly as he took a sip of the coffee that he had made for himself and taking a skeleton chocolate, reminding himself to save some for Farah; that, he reasoned, might appease her. “We can’t go trick or treating,” he replied. “We haven’t got a kid, therefore we haven’t got an excuse.”

   Dirk’s face had fallen, making Todd feel incredibly sorry for him. Amanda and the Rowdy 3 would probably be doing something, he realised, though perhaps not in the usual vein of ‘trick or treating’; no, if Amanda’s last phone call update was anything to go by, it would be ‘trick or treat – both options are going to end very badly for either you or your property’. Though he still had a few misgivings about them, he had to admit that the fact that they pretty much exclusively smashed up the cars and houses of people who were generally twats had made him feel slightly more comfortable with them.

   Halloween night arrived soon after, with Dirk adamantly insisting that the members of the agency dress up for it which, for some reason, seemed to include dressing up the apartment itself. None of them were sure which piece of furniture Mona currently was, so the natural solution was to put decorations on anything and everything that they could reach. Farah had opted for a quick spider on her left cheek drawn by eyeliner, whereas Todd had decided to be a skeleton. Dirk had gone all out but was unable to decide completely on what to be, resulting in a mishmash of themes that was a true horror costume in and of itself. A fake dead body had been suggested for the benefit of trick or treaters but was quickly shut down on the basis that, given that they were a detective agency, children might genuinely think that someone had been murdered. Dirk had point-blank refused to let them all leave, stating that any children who wanted candy – sweets, as he had called them – should be given at least five chocolates minimum. No one had had the heart to tell him that this was slightly excessive.

   At midnight, they finally began to pack up. Farah rubbed the spider off her cheek and Dirk enthusiastically threw out the remnants of the chocolate onto the street, proclaiming that late trick or treaters might find them. “It’s more likely that dogs will find them,” Todd had muttered as Farah persuaded their friend to put the bowl down on the table until further notice. The clock struck midnight when someone knocked sharply, three times, on the door. Dirk immediately leapt up to answer and opened the door with a broad smile, only to stumble back in horror upon seeing who it was. This, of course, gave the person an easy way to enter, which they used.

   “Trick or treat,” a rough voice said, drawing a gasp of recognition from a chair that now seemed to have become a girl – Todd noted that Mona had several orange and black streamers in her hair as she stared at the newcomer, Bart.

   “You’re not going to try and kill me again, are you?” Dirk asked tentatively, having decidedly taken several steps back from Bart and positioning himself as though he was ready to jump out of the window at any given moment.

   “Nah,” she replied, stepping forwards and taking a handful of the sweets out of the bowl that Dirk was holding before stuffing them into her mouth and pulling a face. “I’m not out to kill you any more.”

   No one felt like mentioning that this rather implied that there was someone else who she was out to kill. Considering that the last time that any of them had run into her had ended with some rather ‘interesting’ repercussions, it was probably best not to ask about these sorts of things. ‘ _The universe will sort it out,_ ’ Dirk thought to himself as a sort of consolation.

   “So, like, do you guys do Halloween? ‘cause I saw it was a thing as soon as I got out,” Bart said through a mouthful of sweets and staring around at the decorations that littered the entire room. Her remark elicited a rather shocked gasp from Dirk, because there was only one place that she could possibly have escaped from with the sort of cuts and bruises that now scarred her face and arms. Only one place, of course, that she would be wearing those clothes.

   “Blackwing?” he enquired. “How did you get out? I thought it was… well, I thought it was quite impossible.”

   _But you did it._

   That was the unspoken retort in the room, each person in that moment wondering in their own separate worlds. Dirk wondered how Bart had escaped seemingly unaided. Farah wondered how  many more people in Blackwing had escaped. Todd wondered whether this was now another unspoken target on their backs. Mona wondered what had led Bart here.

   “I just did,” Bart shrugged, staring at the floor with a rather surly expression on her face. It was clear that she didn’t want to talk about it – about the torture that she had gone through, about how she had actually escaped. If, indeed, she had. If she wasn’t simply being let out by Blackwing to find the others.

   Fuck.

   It was as though everyone realised unanimously. Bart stepped back with a rather guilty look her hands outstretched as though to push the others back, as though to distance herself from them. Whoever now ran Blackwing now, clearly, had a better idea of what made the subjects tick; dangerous. Very dangerous. The shots began to ring out soon after, Farah pulling Todd and Dirk to the floor as though they were in some sort of James Bond film and Mona giving a startled squeak before transforming into a toy. Todd exchanged a glance with Farah before moving his attention onto Dirk, who was clenching his shoulder and glaring down at it as though it had personally offended him.

   “Ow!” he exclaimed, looking at the blood staining his jacket and shirt with the sort of distaste that one saves for these sorts of things. He looked up at the other two, noting gladly that Bart seemed to have disappeared from the flat. “I suppose that this is a rather extreme form of what they call a trick, then?” Todd let out a rather choked laugh.

   “Are you okay?” he asked them both, inspecting his own, minimal, wounds and giving the others a rather concerned look – he would need to call Amanda, he realised. He would need to warn her about what had just happened in case… no. They wouldn’t be able to get her.

   “I’m fine,” Farah replied, brushing the dust from where the walls had been hit off her clothes and inspecting the room for any sign of movement from other people. Whilst she had taken the brunt of the short bookcase that had fallen on top of them, she had been shielded from any true injury.

   “I don’t think that I am,” Dirk remarked conversationally, looking down at where the blood from his shoulder was blossoming in an almost rose-like shape, staining his shirt and jacket beyond repair. “It’s alright, though,” he assured them as he took his jacket off and stared at it, beginning to close his eyes as the world swam before him – Todd and Farah’s concerned faces merged into one, and Mona seemed to now be part of his jacket. “The universe will fix it. Somehow.”


End file.
